You know, there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic at this moment.

The vaccine rollout is improving and daily infection rates and hospitalizations are starting

to decline after what was undoubtedly a very dark January.

But in the middle of all this hopefulness, it can also be hard to process the enormity

of loss caused by this virus.

Around the world, more than 2 million people have now died from the coronavirus.

In the United States alone, that number is approaching half a million.

That's half a million lives lost.

Rationally, we know this is devastating.

But emotionally, those numbers can leave many people feeling detached, even numb.

A few months ago, I set out to understand why it is that we can feel so removed from tragedies

of this scale.

And today on the podcast, I want to reshare that episode.

The answer it turns out may have something to do with the concepts psychologists call

compassion fade and an experiment that reveals some of our most surprising moral intuitions

about whose lives are most worth saving.

I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent.

And this is coronavirus, fact versus fiction.

Some of the groups that people were most biased against in our experiment are also the people

who are most vulnerable to the pandemic.

Azim Sharif is an associate professor of social psychology at the University of British

Columbia.

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